Typed Shapes Paper Submitted
I haven’t written much about my progress on Higgs recently. This is because I’ve been busy writing and submitting conference papers. My ECOOP paper about basic block versioning has been accepted, and I just submitted a new paper about typed object shapes to DLS 2015. In July, I’ll be presenting my research at ECOOP in Prague, and then I’ll begin work on a third paper about interprocedural basic block versioning, which will complete my PhD work.
My thesis advisor has suggested that I construct my thesis as a series of conference papers. I already have two papers published about my work with JavaScript. The paper I just submitted and the next one will also be included, for a total of four papers. If everything goes well, I should be submitting my thesis in December 2015 and defending it in February 2016. After nearly 6 years in the PhD program, I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel!
The unfortunate thing, for me, is that coding and working on Higgs is the part of my research that I enjoy the most (what can I say, I like building systems), and I haven’t had time to do much coding recently. Fortunately, there are a few more improvements to Higgs that I’ll implement for my next paper. I’ll be improving the calling convention, which should increase the performance of function calls quite a bit. I also have plans to improve the performance of global variable accesses even further.
Pointers Gone Wild 
Good Work!
Congrats on the light at the end of the tunnel!
> My thesis advisor has suggested that I construct my thesis as a series of conference papers.
That’s actually what I wondered – while you discuss all your journey with Higgs and other projects openly and in detail beyond purely technical (which level of openness is much appreciated and is definitely inspiring), I wondered why there’s no PhD thesis itself available. It’s certainly a personal matter whether to publish it or not, no questions. But this sentence “lost” in one of older blog posts suddenly makes it all clear – is that the situation, that there’s no that typical big 100+ pages thesis per se, and a number of publications + Higgs source code are the deliverables of it? I would appreciate if you could confirm. That’s certainly great materials by all accounts, just would like to confirm that someone interested in this doesn’t miss something obvious. Thanks!
There’s still a PhD thesis combining these papers into one package and presenting some additional information. Universities expect you to submit a document for review before your thesis defence. Mine is linked in the About tab on this blog (https://pointersgonewild.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/phdthesis.pdf).
> Universities expect you to submit a document for review before your thesis defence.
That’s the best of my knowledge either, though I can’t claim to know the specifics, as in my youth, visiting just a few academic conferences was enough to decide against going the PhD way and be swamped into the industry instead.
And I must be blind re: your thesis doc (google too). Thanks for sharing it, and thanks for doing your research in the open! (And sorry for wacky comments from myself and other clueless dudes ;-) ).